This book was very ambiguous in the beginning but already I knew that it was going to be one of the saddest I had ever read. And not the kind of sad in which many people die in a disaster, but the kind of sad in which little things slowly wear away at the protagonist's soul. Thomas Peaceful, the protagonist, had a happy childhood with a family that he loved and who loved him, and he made a great friend, but everything that happened to him seemed to invisibly hurt him. He then signs up in the army as a mere child, too young to even be allowed to. And then he sees the horrors of war. The story builds up until the climax, which leaves the reader with a sense of being lost, not because the beautifully executed ending is ambiguous, but because it is incomprehensible that that could actually happen.